


Moving In

by Monstrosibee



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One), Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Cannibalism, Gen, Loss of Agency, Other, only discussed though
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-12
Updated: 2019-09-12
Packaged: 2020-10-17 06:26:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20616479
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Monstrosibee/pseuds/Monstrosibee
Summary: The brothers had agreed to open up shop again. They just hadn't discussed opening other things.





	Moving In

It only took half an Earth hour to move all of their meager belongings into the empty business suite in Metroplex's new commercial district, and that was without the help from several of Needlenose's eager hangers-on that had congregated outside the previously abandoned storefront. He knew half of them were only there because they had nowhere else to go after the collapsed Decepticon revival, a quarter were there because they'd been friends with Horri-Bull and still felt a bit of commitment to him, a handful were Tracks' maybe-friends, and maybe one or two actually LIKED Needlenose and felt a genuine desire to help.

He left the sliding store hatch closed.

The dusty room was small, even for his standards, and as he stacked the last box behind the counter tucked close to the front entrance, he had to blast cobwebs out of his vents. Metroplex had been here on this dirt ball for a week tops, and he already had organic pests. Whatever was left of the Camiens were going to have their work cut out for them.

"Nosey, I left your box on the dispensary table!" Tracks' voice floated down from the stairs near the back of the empty storefront where they lead to the tiny apartment above. Needlenose scowled beneath his faceplate; he'd told his brother repeatedly to stop calling him that. He wasn't fresh out of the ground anymore.

He took a final look at the boxes on the counter, then trotted to and up the stairwell, hand in front of his face to ward off the cobwebs. 

Tracks was in the energon dispensary at the top of the stairs, back to Needlenose and wings cocked at an angle. In each hand, he held one of their energon glasses, and as he turned at the sound of feet on the stairs, he squinted at them each in turn. 

He waved the one in his right hand at his brother. "What color is this? I'm trying to sort these damn glasses but I packed my lenses somewhere and and I haven't gotten the chance to look for them."

"It's one that we got at Vexmart last week. It's blue." He plucked it from Tracks' hand as he passed, grabbing a marker from a drawer and scribbling a tiny star on the bottom. It tucked neatly into the cabinet over the sink. "Why don't you let me handle the glasses and you go deal with starting on the shelves we got for downstairs? It's gonna take a year and a half to put them together so we might as well get started."

Letting out a vent rattling sigh, Tracks continued pulling glasses out of the box next to the sink, and Needlenose joined him. "The instructions are color coded, or I would. You'd think it'd be cheaper just to print them in black and white, but I guess that would be too easy."

"Or you could go look for your glasses and stop grumbling about it." Needlenose marked another of the Vexmart glasses with a star, and handed it to his brother. "You've been colorblind for over four million years. I don't know why you keep losing those stupid things."

Snatching the glass, Tracks shoved it into the cabinet. "I didn't LOSE them, they're in a box somewhere." He paused, then scowled. "And it's not like I'm used to having them. Couldn't afford them before everything happened, and then there was no one making them. You should know that."

"Not like you ever told me."

They both went silent, the only sounds the clinking of glasses on metal and the squeak of the marker. Somewhere nearby, heavy flight engines started up and shuttle took off past the window. Two sets of optics, one red and one blue, tracked the shuttle past the glass, and Tracks smiled and waved as it blinked its landing lights at him.

"Looks like they're still moving the rest of the science team into their block." Pulling the last glass out of the box, he handed it to his brother and dropped the container onto the floor, stomping it into a shape more conducive to fitting in the disposal chute. "Looks like we'll have some interesting neighbors, at least."

The image of a singular red optic and purple paint flashed across Needlenose's mind as he labeled and stowed the last glass, and his plating unconsciously reset itself with discomfort. He snatched up the flattened box - maybe just a tad too hastily - and replied, "Just what we need. The demolitions teams setting up their experimental range right down the street."

He regretted it as soon as he said it, but Tracks didn't say anything. Just looked at him for a long moment, then turned back to the other boxes on the table and started stripping the tape off of the top of one. They'd had a few of those little back and forths now, where old (or not so old - even now the purple badge glinted on Needlenose's chest, and he wasn't sure if it was going to remain) faction cultures bled into neutral conversations and set both brother's circuits tingling. They'd learned not to acknowledge when something struck a nerve that the other wouldn't understand but it still made things...hard. Or harder than they already were.

Needlenose left the dispensary, scuffing his feet across the tiles beside the table, and grabbed one of the boxes with his name glyph scratched on the top. It was light, whatever he'd stored inside jingling about like several sets of keyrings, and it made him suspect the contents without having to open it. Pausing, he glanced over his shoulder to where Tracks was shuffling through a several sets of glass polish, then took the short hallway to his tiny habsuite, across the hall from another. 

He shut his door gently, wincing at the barely audible sound it made, then dropped the box onto the bare berth. 

At that moment, if he could have set it on fire with just his eyes, he would have. It was stupid that he had still kept them; he wasn't the trigger happy. five thousand year fresh out of the ground newspark. He wasn't fighting the evil oppressive Autobots by the side of fellow righteous revolutionaries, he was a beaten old jet who'd fallen for some clever words by a traumatized miner with serious impulse control problems and too much access to heavy artillery. Keeping these kinds of things was juvenile and kind of purposeless, and VERY tasteless.

He ripped the box open, shifting aside the other containers inside for the one he recognized. This one was ancient, a metal lock box instead of the cardboard ones that the human embassy had offered to the pitiful remaining Cybertronian population for moving their few possessions from place to place. His processor ticked through several words, then settled on one that he THOUGHT was the correct passcode, and he spun the low tech word lock until it clicked.

The moment between the click of the lock and Needlenose actually lifting the lid weighed on him like an overfull subspace, and the box shook in his hands as it opened to reveal three Autobot badges. Wear and tear was evident on each one in turn, damaged in different ways that his fingers lingered over with uncomfortable familiarity. They were a little less robust than Decepticon badges; most Autobots had had theirs painted on, or made of something weaker than the durable casing around their sparks. He'd cut one of them straight off the shoulder of the corpse he'd claimed it from, and even now the crooked teeth of the sawed off edges could nick an energon line open if he wasn't careful around his joints. 

"Roadflare, Asphalt, and Turnlane." He'd known them all, saw them opposite of himself on the battlefield and felt the burn of grief and disappointment in his lines. It was petty; the Decepticon cause had originally been about righteousness, about reclaiming a planet for its people, not about settling petty grudges against old friends.

But the tremble in his fingers was still from repressed anger, and denta grit beneath his mask so loudly he could hear them echo in the dark hab. Pulling the faceplate off, Needlenose ran those shaking fingers over his face, exploring the pits and scars there in an attempt at distraction. One of those had been made by Turnlane, in the last moments of his life as he struggled with Needlenose on the bridge of a weapons delivery ship. It split the jet's lip at the left corner, exposing teeth and leaving his expression in a permanent half snarl, one of his missing canines very obvious in the dark cavern of his mouth.

It wasn't what pissed him off the most.

"You were a building maintenance worker." His words smoldered in his throat, made his systems mutter in wary discomfort at each other at the familiar signs of a panic attack. "You had it worse off than half the guys I saw die for this useless shitty movement, and you joined up with the ex-cop and his crew of holier-than-thou hypocrites because you thought you were better than us for being less desperate."

"And I killed you for it."

He stared dumbly at the badge, as though expecting an answer, then sagged backwards against his berth. The Autobot badges clattered against the berth, little metal _tings _startling the primal coding in the back of his processor into fluffing his plating in an intimidation display to no one in particular.

"Nosey, can I come in?" Tracks slid the analog door open just slightly, squinting in the dark of the hab. His glasses were pushed up on his nose, lenses almost touching his optics. 

"I don't care, Tracks. It's not like there's anything in here yet." Despite his apathetic answer, Needlenose hurried to clear the boxes away, stuffing the badges back into their case and shoving it under the berth. "What do you want? I thought you wanted to finish unpacking the stuff for the dispensary."

"I did, it's just..." In over five million years, Needlenose had never seen his brother so uncomfortable. "Look, we never talked about all the bad shit between us. We yelled about it for a while, and I'm tired of that being the only resolution we had." Venting heavily, he kicked a crate into the room and sat down on it, leaning his elbows onto his knees. "Silent tension is fun and all, but I think the past four million years has kind of proved that communication is important."

Needlenose snorted. "What can we even talk about? We've hashed out the whole stupid Con-Bot thing a million times."

"I don't care about the stupid war." The jet looked up in surprise, meeting his brother's steady blue gaze with his own red one, and was surprised to see a decent measure of resolve there. "I care about you, and what happened to you DURING the stupid war and why it made us into different people who couldn't talk to each other."

Needlenose's wings rose in offense, and he bared his teeth, insulted. "As if your pig-headed bigoted attitude towards MY ideas before the war had NOTHING to do with it."

"I'm not saying they didn't!" Tracks quickly regained his composure, settling his plating back into place. "I'm saying that I don't want things to go back to the way they were before the war."

He waited for a reply, then frowned when none came and settled his back against the wall, looking upwards. "When my platoon was on Earth, at one point, the humans stuck a bunch of us in alt mode. I was one of them; couldn't move, couldn't talk, couldn't transform. We were captured by Skywatch and spent a while in captivity before a Decepticon attack ended up freeing me." His optics were far away, looking at nothing in particular, and he scrubbed his face with his hands. "I haven't been able to transform without feeling physically ill since. I almost purged on the way over here because the boxes in my trunk felt like the stuff the Skywatch humans shoved in there."

Ice crawled through Needlenose's lines, and he sat straighter on the berth. "Why are you telling me this?"

The intense look was back in Tracks' eyes. "Because you weren't there for it. Because it affects me to this day and I want you to understand that I trust you with that information about myself because we're brothers first and everything else comes second." He looked away. "And because I want you to understand that I'm not the same person I was before the war, and that I don't think that person was right about how he treated you or your ideas."

A pause. "Was that an apology? Tracks of Iacon apologized to me?"

Tracks grimaced, crossing his arms. "I'm five million years old, I'm old enough to admit when I'm wrong." He pushed his glasses up on his face, blinking as they adjusted their parameters to the new position. "And I was wrong when I decided I knew better than you in regards to your own damn idea. All that stuff that I said about the shop..."

He lapsed into silence, glaring down at his own finger joints like they'd just insulted him. Needlenose watched him expectantly as another shuttle blew past the window, rattling the glass and knocking a few of the smaller items off his berth.

Glancing at the corner of the box of badges still poking from beneath the berth, he pressed his plating flat. Tracks was being earnest about this, being completely genuine, and that was something he never did, even with his own brother. Tracks spoke loftily and with the tinge of that obnoxious Upper Rodionic accent he'd picked up from some of his business contacts. Tracks snarled at people who scuffed his paint or pointed out his glasses.

Needlenose hadn't spent this much time with his brother in over four million years.

He discharged a vent of hot air heavy enough to knock several dead spiders out from under his plating where they'd perished. Their little carcasses scattered around him in a broken crooked halo, and he finally looked Tracks in his eyes. 

They'd both been forged with energon pink optics, but somewhere along the line - a couple centuries before the beginning of the war, if he tracked it right - they'd both had them replaced with the common colors of their factions. And for what reason? He supposed it was probably originally loyalty, but by the time the war ended, it was just easier for medics to keep a single color of optic on hand. And pink optics had always been a rare - and stigmatized - color for optics, especially when a bot was forged with them.

"You know, we resorted to cannibalizing live bots when Starscream was in control for that little time near the end." Tracks' wings twitched with surprised when Needlenose spoke, then he grimaced as he took in what his brother had said. "If I hadn't taken a wing and a fuel pump off another 'Con that me and some half dead stragglers had murdered, I'd be dead today. Either killed by a shorted pump or by another 'Con for being useless."

Tracks sat and digested this for a moment, then nodded. "We never murdered for parts but...I've got a set of cog screw from another Autobot who probably could've been saved. I didn't know his name."

Another shuttle. Needlenose watched it rumble past the window again. "It's probably easier that way."

It started to rain.


End file.
